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Update on K! It’s been awhile…

Holy cow. It’s been TWO months since I’ve made a post on here. That’s embarrassing and really silly on my part. My apologies for how long it’s been and also for the long post that will follow.

Since my last post, I completed my second round of IM:30 and finished it in May. As A mentioned in a previous post, I too was a little disappointed in my results. I mean, I had improvements in my overall fitness ability and my endurance is pretty good. But I didn’t see any significant physical change in my body other than my arms. I follow quite a bit of fitness people on Instagram and they show these 8 week transformations and all these women go from flab to fab in no time. I get frustrated on the regular about why it’s so hard for me to lose weight or see significant change now. Just 2 years ago, I could see change very quickly when I dialed in on my diet and started a new fitness program. Things have changed and I’m stagnant. I’m holding at 135-137 lbs. Here’s what’s interesting: When I was 127 lbs and felt my best, my waist was a size 27. My waist is a size 27 right now. Here I am 8-10 lbs heavier but my waist is the same. I’m pretty sure my hips and thighs are bigger, but I carry my weight in my stomach so it’s just weird and bizarre to me. I’m truly baffled by what’s going on with my body!

Workouts

With that being said, let’s talk about what I’ve been doing since I finished IM:30.

I finished Max right before school let out for the summer, so now my dynamic has changed with my son being home. We have been so busy wrapping up his soccer season, camps and play dates. The days go by so fast. I do make time for myself to get in a work out of some sort. I’ve been running more on the road and trails, and I’ve done a few Max workouts, 21 day fix extreme workouts, and created my own HIIT-type workouts. I’ve even trained with my friend who’s a personal trainer a few times and she kicked my ass. Basically, my goal is to move hard for 30 mins 5-6x a week. Last week I pretty much failed that goal in that I didn’t do any workouts, except play in a soccer league game yesterday. I attended camp all week with my son and by the time I got home, I was exhausted from the stifling heat and activities. Oh well, today is a new day and start of a new week.

My husband recently completed a Spartan race and now he’s all jacked up about completing his “trifecta” this year. That means he needs to complete a sprint race (which he did), a super race, and a beast race. The super is 8-10 miles and the beast is 10-16 miles. The recommended activities to master the races is to be able to do burpees, pull-ups and push-ups. I told him I couldn’t think of a better training program than IM:30! Endurance is key for those races, then strength second. I really want to do one, but I’ll start with a sprint to see if I like it. So my sporadic training as of lately has been geared towards the possibility of doing a Spartan race in Chicago in August. Eek!

We leave for Seattle on July 1 for a week. I’m so pumped to visit my brother and his family! My husband and son haven’t been there, so we are going to do it right and visit all the landmarks and eat our way through the city. We have plans to hike Mount Rainier, so I’ll be sure to post a pic when we reach the top. 🙂 With that being said, I won’t be starting an exercise program until I get back. I’m thinking I will do Insanity Asylum or a hybrid of Asylum and Max:30 the Monday I get back, so mid-July. I tried a few workouts from 21 day extreme and it just didn’t give me the calorie burn that my body craves. I know I didn’t give it a fair shot, but I can tell it’s not something I would want to stick with. I did like the food containers that came with the program, so I’ll talk about that next!

Food

I give myself a B- on clean eating for the past 2 months. I’m going to drop some excuse bombs on you all, but I know you can relate! Listen, life is crazy and unpredictable for most people. The secret to getting an A+ in clean eating is to plan out and prep your healthy meals. That’s it. It seems easy enough, right? It’s not. At least for me it’s not. Here come all my excuse bombs.

1). I have a ton of family that live around me and there seems to always be some sort of function we need to attend, which always revolves around–you guessed it–FOOD.

2). We have some cool soccer friends that always want to go out for drinks and dinner, or invite us to their house after games. I don’t like to turn down opportunities for my son to get social time with friends. And who am I kidding…I need some social time with adults too! I miss adult interaction since I stopped working.

3). My husband works so hard and is gone a lot. I don’t like creating a nice meal for just me. And since our life has been on the go lately, it’s hard to sit down and enjoy salmon w/ broccoli and sweet potatoes while driving. (don’t try that, by the way).

4). I love chips and sneak them in my mouth every once in a while.

5). I’m easily influenced to ditch the prepped meal and do something else.

6). It takes me forever to do things, so planning and prepping meals takes several hours.

So there’s my issues. The good news is that I can work around these things and make good choices when we go out or just MAKE THE TIME to do the prep. I gave myself a B- because I really work hard to order a salad when I go out, or drink one alcoholic beverage instead of three but I need to improve on portion control. That’s the hardest part for me. Here’s where those containers get pretty handy. The 21 day fix plan is exactly the same as Max:30, so I try to get my 4 servings of protein, 3 veggies, 2 fruits, etc., etc. Those tiny, baby containers really teach you how much you’ve probably been over-eating.

Here are the containers with various objects to show you the sizing. Yes, that’s a cassette tape and I happened to have that around my house. Long live the 80’s!

As you can see, the containers aren’t very big. The green is veggies; purple: fruit; red: protein; yellow: carbs; blue: fats (avocado, nuts); and orange: dressings. It really does take some getting used to for sure. I won’t lie and say you won’t be HANGRY for the first few days.

This is a pic of one of my meals I made using the containers. It was delicious for dinner and terrible left over the next day for lunch. It’s quinoa, kale, sweet potatoes and an egg. That’s on a small plate. It actually filled me up for a good 30 minutes. Hooray! I’m kidding. 😉

And here’s some bathroom selfies of my stomach. These are always taken first thing when I wake up in the morning, so don’t mind the pajama pants, tired eyes and messy hair. 🙂 I wish I didn’t have crappy lighting/shadowing in the last pics, because it’s hard to see results. I do see a couple abs up top trying to make their debut. Slowly but surely I pray they come out!

April

May

June

There you have it. Sorry it’s been a long and overdue post. I will be sure to keep you all updated more frequently. Have a productive week and I will too!